6 ways in which being an avid reader made me a better listener

My mentor used to say “In life, all the things are independently dependent on each other.”

This quote made me reflect on how a change in one aspect affects all the aspects of life. For example – daily workout improves the quality of sleep which in turn makes the entire day energetic. One meaningful relationship motivates to be more empathic and thus with time it rubs off in social and professional life. You will notice these changes only when you take a bird’s eye view of life.

 As a trainer,  conducting workshops on reading skill, I started observing how other things affect reading style. The conclusion was - Reading is a part of life and not apart from life. That means, whatever you do throughout the day is going to affect your reading. If you have worked hard and are mentally exhausted, it will be difficult to concentrate on any activity. It’s not like that the moment you open the book, the body will ignore everything and focus.  Reading is not something to be done for few minutes a day and then forget it instead it's a lifestyle. Read more about it - https://goo.gl/jXYmEs

The next thing I reflected on was that if A=B then B=A, which means if other things affect reading then improvement in reading skills must affect other aspects. On reflection, I realized a strange fact that improvement in reading skill had improved my listening skill. I had read books on improving social skills and knew the importance of listening. However, I had never taken the conscious efforts for improving listening skill. This made me reflect on the reason for improvement.  After months of reflection, I could pinpoint 6 reasons

1- Being focused

At slow speeds, you can multitask or daydream. But while Velocity reading  (reading at higher speeds), you need to stay 100% focused. If not then you will have to re-read.  Initially, I could focus only while distraction were less – early mornings or late nights. But over the period, my ability to focus improved, I could read regularly anytime and everywhere. Connecting it with listening, isn’t the same thing required?  The ability to focus anytime, as the conversation happens any time and anywhere. If you can’t give attention to the speaker, it’s difficult to understand the other person.

2-Entertaining without accepting

As an Indian, it is common to feel bitter towards our neighboring country. People gave angry looks when they saw me reading a biography of one of their prominent leaders. I still do not agree with the way that country is treating India. However keeping my views aside and seeing the world from their leader’s perspective, I got a better understanding of their country.

Similarly, each book takes you to a different level of understanding by giving a different perspective. Before I started reading regularly, if I knew about any concept then my views were fixed. Once I started reading regularly, I realized how a same incident/ concept can have different viewpoints. With more reading, I become more open to new ideas or in words of Aristotle, my journey to have an educated mind started.

"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it" - Aristotle

Similarly, I had fixed mind-sets about people and failed to accept their views. It’s only after becoming open-minded, I could actually listen to them without any biases.  Thus I stopped getting too attached to my views about others and started listening to them.

3-Reading without reflecting

How many times have you started reading a book but left it midway? I  faced that issue too. It usually happened because of too many distracting thoughts. If you analyze the flow, it usually happens when some lines resonate with your life so much that you start reflecting. While reflection, for some time you are in alignment with lines from the book but after that, one thought leads to another and thus distracting you from diving further into the book. It’s like when you throw a pebble in a lake, it would sink right away but when you spin it at high speeds then it would refuse to sink. It keeps moving forward and covers more distance before sinking. By using a similar analogy, to avoid getting distracted while reading, you must read the entire concept/chapter without sinking midway. Only after understanding the entire concept/chapter from author’s perspective, you should start reflecting.

Connecting it to listening, reflecting only after listening the entire talk proved to be an important skill. Reflecting it mid-way, I used to get distracted. Thus while reading, I started applying the technique of reflecting only after reading entire concept/chapter, unconsciously with time I started listening without reaching conclusions midway.

4-Summarising

As I was reading a lot of books, people requested to write book summaries. I went a step further and also created few video book summaries. (Watch the video book summary of 5 love languages - https://youtu.be/DH8RutXMHso). Many times I felt, I had understood a book completely but while summarising realized how unclear it was. Thus the summarising process helped me to check my understanding level.

Realising this, I got in the habit of summarising at the end of everything – be it be a book, an e-course or an important meeting. And this improved my listening skills. Because while listening, even if you have heard everything with 100% attention, the speaker’s interpretation and your conclusion might vary.

Here’s an example - I was on a writing project with my friend Pratima. She told me to push her so to fulfill her tasks. I interpreted the “push” as “pushing her for more tasks”. This made her overwhelmed. When we meet to discuss the progress, I could sense from the body language that she was upset. Probing deeper, I realized it was because of pushing her to do more tasks. When I defended myself by saying, she wanted me to push, she said the word “push” meant just remind her to do tasks and not to do more tasks. This was a great learning experience. Therefore, today at the end of any important discussions, I summarise to check my understanding and interpretation. Thus summarising proved to be an effective way to improve my listening skills which made me better at relationships.

5- Re-reading

Initially, I read the book once and never felt like reading it again. Once while surfing on the internet, I came across a story of a man traveling in the subway (read the story - https://goo.gl/S8qNWx), this story created a lot of impacts and gave me an important learning of understanding the other’s perspective before reaching to a conclusion. The Blogger just mentioned he had read it from a book and hyperlinked it to the book source. I clicked on the hyperlink and skipped the remaining article to check the name of the book and even before the site was fully opened, I decided to buy that book.

The name of the book was – “7 habits of highly effective people” and it was a shock to me. The shock was because I had read that book earlier but missed that impactful story. I decided to read that book again and got a way better understanding than I had my previous reading. Thus it removed my mindset of reading books just once. Read more about the importance of re-reading a book - https://goo.gl/1u9xsK

Connecting it with listening when people started talking about a topic which I knew, I would just pretend to listen but rarely did. But that book’s incident made me realize that level of understanding might increase even if I listen/read the same thing. Initially, I use to get irritated when mom shared my school memories. I ignored her as I left I already knew it.  Once I started really listening and I realized how different that incident meant for her then I had thought to be. Thus I started listening (not just pretending) even if someone speaks on a topic I already have an idea about.   

6- Listening with empathy

I always wondered whether reading fiction books have any real-life applications. Can we learn something from fiction books that can help us to grow? Or we must just read fiction books for pleasure. Sometimes stories can be inspiring and we may learn something from characters but can fiction book really help to grow any skill of ours? Then I came across A 2006 study conducted by a Psychologist Raymond Mar. He discovered that parts of the brain used for decoding thoughts and feelings of others light up the MRI machine when people are processing stories. This was found similar to people watching dramatic television shows. When you regularly process information via stories, you will express more empathy. Thus reading fiction improves empathy (Read more about it - https://goo.gl/XumDqS). And the more I read fiction, I started observing changes in my ability to connect with others.

Empathy is the number one skill for better listening. Empathy is like a muscle, it always improves when used regularly to feel for others.  Reading fiction helped me to connect with the character and overtime this ability to connect improved in life too. Thus I can easily connect to any person’s story and feel the same emotions just by listening to him/her.

Thus these 6 reasons in which I feel my regular reading helped me to be a better listener. In case you have experienced how being an avid reader made you a better listener, I would love to read your experience in comments.

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